Organizations use large numbers of computers that are typically grouped together according to their main usage. For example, servers may be grouped according to clusters, business units, or other designations. System administrators maintain the grouped computers. One of the goals of the system administrators is to ensure that the computers within a group have similarly installed packages and patches.
One method of doing installations across large numbers of computers and/or large numbers of groups is to use automated tools. The automated tools help to maintain uniformity within groups. Thus, the packages that are installed are identical on all computers within a group.
In order to maintain the computers, the administrators sometimes need to fix, tweak, patch, etc. the computers. This maintenance can cause individual computers to change their configurations and installations. Thus, computers end up having installations that are different from one another.
Identification of the various configurations of the individual computers across groups can be determined by manually inspecting the versions and installations. Unfortunately, there is a tremendous amount of data to maintain regarding the installations on each computer, especially in the case where there are many groups. This amount of information can be overwhelming, making it incredibly difficult for an administrator to manually identify anomalies within computer groups.
After an anomaly is identified, an administrator must then figure out what should be done to correct the anomaly. Again, there is a tremendous amount of data to analyze across the computers and across groups, in order to determine what action needs to be taken to correct the anomaly. Furthermore after the anomaly is corrected, the administrator must again survey the computers and groups to check for uniformity.